Content providers have long struggled with how to provide content at a high availability and high performance to their customers in view of bandwidth limitations in content distribution networks. A content delivery/distribution network (CDN) can be a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers connected to the Internet or other public/private communications network. A CDN can be a managed or unmanaged network, and can also be a federation of managed or unmanaged networks. The goal of a CDN is to serve media content (e.g., video/audio/etc.) to user equipment nodes (UEs) with high availability and high performance. The bandwidth requirements for distributing content from content providers to central CDN servers and/or to distributed edge replication servers have grown tremendously with the proliferation of adaptive streaming content delivery solutions.
Adaptive streaming technology is being implemented to handle increasing consumer demands for streaming content (e.g., broadcast and on-demand movies/TV, etc.) across a content distribution network to UEs having widely differing performance and protocols, both in managed and unmanaged network environments. In the context of managed networks such as IPTV distribution over a service provider IP network, it should be appreciated that content delivery to the end user requires careful orchestration and management of various network infrastructure elements in order to address issues such as bandwidth, content protection, scalability and reachability, as well as adherence to requisite performance indicators, among others. Whereas advances in the media delivery technology continue apace, issues relating to high bandwidth and storage costs associated with the media delivery for multiple protocols, especially with multiple encryption schemes, as well as achieving cost-effective convergence of delivery network infrastructures, etc., remain challenging.